Communicative Virtues of A-T. Tymieniecka’s Phenomenology of Life

Abstract

It did not seem truly possible that Nietzsche’s expectations could be met: that being and becoming could converge in one λόγος/logos and that the latter in turn, freed from both the confines of monism and the reductionism of dualism, could unfold in the previously unknown metamorphic form, which is able to draw together (=λέγειν/legein) the entities that change and become, in the infinite multiformity of their states, passages, forms and conditions. Yet this is precisely what the phenomenology of life is able to announce: the search for the principle of all things has been reanimated and has begun again to dare to know, according to the Kantian motto: “Sapere aude!”. Between the animate and inanimate, the human and non-human, and the numerous polarities that have crystallized in the modern course of thought, the new ontological hermeneutics made possible by the ontopoiesis of life is building new logoic bridges that open Post-Modernity to a new Enlightenment. The work of intuitive re-sowing of the terrain of Husserlian phenomenology that A-T. Tymieniecka has carried out for 40 years, and which culminates in the development of the phenomenology of life, has in fact manifested the metamorphic logos in the creative acts of the individual living human being; it presides over every inorganic, organic and conscious make-being. From this communicative discovery the precious possibility of a new inquiry of philosophia prima arises.

To the memory of my dear friend and talented scholar

Romana Martorelli Vico†

Translated by Serena Rossi

Romana Martorelli Vico was teaching History of Medieval Philosophy at the University of Urbino (Italy). She focused her studies and research interests on the medical aspects of Medieval thinking, giving editions of texts like: Mondini de Leuciis, Expositio super capitulum De Generation embrionis Canonis Avicennae (Rome 1993); Aegidii Romani Opera omnia II. 13. De formatione humani corporis in utero (Firenze 2008). As a member of “The World Phenomenology Institute”, she published: L’apport de la Scolastique à l’élaboration d’une philosophie de la vie, in «Actes du 35ème Colloque International de Phénoménologie», Paris 7–9 October 1994, «Analecta Husserliana», L (1997), pp. 131–142 and Phenomenological points of departure in medieval thought: reflections for study, in Phenomenological Inquiry, The World Phenomenology Institute, Belmont (Mass.) 2001, pp. 58–60. In addition to various essays on Italian and foreign journals, she published the volume: Medicina e filosofia. Per una storia dell’embriologia medievale nel XIII e XIV secolo (Milan 2002). She was a member of the Italian Scientific Commission for editing “The Medical School of Salerno”.